1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for collecting tracepoint data.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
As computers and software become more advance, the need to collect execution data, error data, and other operational data has also increased. To collect some forms of data, tracepoints may be employed for applications. A tracepoint, as the term is used in this specification, is an indication in an application that, when encountered, triggers a particular action, such as data collection. In many implementations, a tracepoint is similar to a debugger breakpoint, except that encountering a breakpoint typically halts execution of the underlying application while encountering a tracepoint generally does not. Tracepoints are typically only associated with a single, predefined action or set of actions prior to run-time. Further, multiple tracepoints in a single application have no relation to one another. That is, encountering one tracepoint does not affect the action carried out when subsequently encountering a different tracepoint.